Young rapper puts gender politics under spotlight in Egypt. London Guardian Defines Feminism as Islamaphobia.

Gender statement through elections Times of India BHUBANESWAR: Two hijiras have entered the electoral fray in Bhubaneswar, while a third backed out in the last moment due to “procedural” reasons on the last day of nominations on Friday. The transgenders said the municipal elections will be a good occasion to sensitize people about the cause of “sexual minorities.”

Madhuri Kinnar on Friday filed nominations from ward number 30 (Saheednagar), reserved for women. “I will try to give the best possible fight by highlighting the civic issues,” she said.

Menaka alias Prashant Parida filed the papers for the unreserved ward number 15 (rental colony, VIP area, Swadhin Nagar) on Thursday. Kajal, another transgender, had bought a nomination paper for filing and had readied her documents. However, she did not file after the Odisha Kinnar Mahasabha (OKM), an association of the hijiras, which backed these candidates, could not choose a suitable ward for her.

The newly elected P.C. Mariama Jaward Tamia scored 406 votes as against her counterparts in an election with 704 valid votes, giving her a landslide victory in the just concluded elections for the Paramount Chieftaincy in that chiefdom.

In an interview shortly after the election result was announced, the young P.C. Tamia said for two years now she has been preparing herself to contest for the chieftaincy position.

Voice of the youth: Egyptian rapper Myam Mahmoud.Photo: Ruth Pollard

Young rapper puts gender politics under spotlight in Egypt Sydney Morning Herald Her rap cuts to the heart of most young women’s experience in Egypt, tackling head on the country’s epidemic of sexual harassment, the relentless criticism of how girls dress and the false equivalence that attempts to justify men’s stares.

The 18-year-old took her message to the masses in October, making it to the semi-finals of the reality TV show Arabs Got Talent, rapping about girls’ rights and the crushing weight of societal expectation to an audience of millions across the Middle East.

Myam Mahmoud – in her first year of political science at university – has been rapping since she was 10, when she started writing poetry that soon grew into rap.

Late blooming of women’s rights Arab News Islam has given women their rights to be educated, inherit, and to have a voice in domestic as well as public life 1,400 years ago when the rest of the world did not even consider women’s rights to be an issue.
Ironically, the same religion is practiced nowadays in Saudi Arabia, which is the land of the birth of Islam, as a tool to justify violations of women’s rights. Unfortunately, some of the Arab or should one say tribal traditions and customs, which even predated Islam, have crept into our lives and got confused with Islamic teachings. As a result, many women have not only been oppressed, but they have been convinced that true gender equality is against their Islamic beliefs. This connotation has delayed the demand for women’s rights in Saudi Arabia in comparison with the rest of the world mainly because many people would question the piety of any woman who would demand true gender equality.

Guardian Defines Feminism as Islamaphobia Dallas Blog (blog) When it comes to make a decision over whether to fights for the rights of women or radical Islamists, the Guardian Newspaper of London sides with Islam.

According to the Guardian, “As a person who writes about women’s issues, I am constantly being told that Islam is the greatest threat to gender equality in this or any other country – mostly by white men, who always know best. This has been an extraordinary year for feminism, but from the Rochdale grooming case to interminable debates over whether traditional Islamic dress is “empowering” or otherwise, the rhetoric and language of feminism has been co-opted by Islamophobes, who could not care less about women of any creed or colour.”

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The UK Political Studies Association Women and Politics Specialist Group. Resource for researchers working on women and/or gender and for women in the PSA. The 2014 Specialist Group of the Year.
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